"Dead or alive, he's here," growled the general. "I'll find him! I'll make him leadme to the Togethership!"
Boysie Gann remembered the sounds behind the door. He said, "There is one place, General. One place where . . . someone might be. Behind the bodies was a door—"
"Come on!" shouted Wheeler, not waiting to hear him out, and led the way like an animated machine, arms flailing, harsh breath rasping. Gann and the girl had found him far from the observatory room, down in the subterranean storage spaces of the dome, poking and shouting into recesses of canned food and unused spools of tape. Even in Mercury's light grasp it was a long, hard, running climb back to the instrument room, and even Sister Delta Four was gasping for breath before they made half the distance back. Then they all stopped, panting, staring at each other. For all of them had caught the same sound—the distant rumble of caterpillar tracks, carried faintly through Mercury's rock and the structure of the station.
It was the entranceways, the long tubular protuberances through which their ship had been linked to the lock of the observatory dome. They were in motion. Either another ship had arrived . . .
Or their own ship was taking off!
"Let's go!" cried Boysie Gann, and they ran the remaining distance faster than before.
The great door was standing open and the bodies were gone.
General Wheeler and Gann turned without words and searched the room, under desks, behind cabinets, even inside the servicing hatches of the instruments themselves. "They're gone," said Gann at last, and the general echoed his words: "They're gone."
Another voice said, "They've taken your ship, too."
Gann and the general spun around. Sister Delta Four had not troubled to search the room with them. She had gone through the door, into a tiny, steel-walled cubicle that had evidently been designed for holding the most important records in safety in the event of some disaster or mischance to the station. What it held now was another sort of treasure entirely. It was a girl, her hps white where they had been gagged, her arms still trailing ropes that Sister Delta Four had not finished taking off her. "They took your ship," she repeated. "All three of them. They opened the door for me—and left."
Gann hardly heard what she was saying. Something else was filling his mind. Honey-haired, softly tanned of skin, eyes blue and bright... he knew that girl.
The girl in the observation dome in Mercury was the girl he had left weeks and billions of miles from here and now. It was Quarla Snow.
14
In the bright, refrigerated dome the pumps poured cooling air in upon them, but the great storm-racked globe of the Sun that hung in the viewing screen seemed to beat down on them as if they were naked on Mercury's rock.
Quarla Snow reached out and touched Boysie Gann's arm. "I thought you were dead," she said wonderingly, and her eyes went toward Sister Delta Four, kneeling beside her, patiently, absently rubbing Quarla's chafed wrists.
"Never mind that," said Gann. "How did you get here? Was it—the Starchild?"
Quarla shook her head, not in denial but in doubt. "I don't know. After you disappeared I set out to look for you."
General Wheeler, at one of the optical telescopes, rapped angrily, "There! I see the villains! Between us and the Sun!" He studied the controls of his instruments furiously, selected a switch and turned it. The great image of the Sun in the screen danced and dwindled as the field of vision of a new telescope replaced the old one.
They saw the Plan cruiser that had brought them, already very remote in the black, star-sprinkled sky that surrounded the blazing globe.
"I wonder who's piloting it," murmured Boysie Gann.
"Those criminals you saw here!" Wheeler barked. "Playing possum! They fooled you! Now they've taken our ship and we're marooned."
"General," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I don't ask you to believe me, but I was not fooled. They were not pretending to be dead. They were dead."
"Impossible," rasped the general. "Look at the idiots! They're heading straight for the Sun. The ship isn't designed for photosphere temperatures! They'll kill themselves!"
Gann turned wearily back to Quarla Snow. "You said you went looking for me. Why?"
She flushed and looked away. She did not answer the question. She said, "Colonel Zafar died. My father reported it—it was dangerous, you see—and he took the body into Freehaven for examination. He did not know what had become of you. Neither did I. But ... I thought I could find you."
Sister Delta Four got up quietly, crossed to the girl's other side, began to rub circulation into the other wrist. Quarla went on, her eyes avoiding Boysie Gann's. As she spoke she looked sometimes at Sister Delta Four, sometimes at General Wheeler, sometimes at the great hanging orb of the Sun and the Plan cruiser that was moving slowly toward its long, tentacle-like prominences.
She had gone outside, she said, and called her spaceling. Then she brought Harry Hickson's pyropod out into the open air, released it, watched it circle them twice, then arrow off into space itself . . . and, riding the spaceling, she had followed it.
"After you disappeared and Colonel Zafar died, it seemed to go crazy," she said. "Raced around the house—I thought it was looking for you. And I thought it might find you, if I set it free."
"The Starchild!" boomed General Wheeler. "Get to the Starchild, woman! Did you ever find the Starchild?"
She hesitated. "I think I did," she said at last. "I think I met the Starchild in the heart of Reef Whirlpool."
Reef Whirlpool—not a planet, not a sun, not a comet. Not even a Reef in the true sense. It was something that partook of some of the elements of all of them. It had begun as a Reef, no doubt. It orbited Sol like a planet, if a distant one; like a comet, most of its bulk was gases. And it burned with hydrogen-helium fusion at its core, like a star.
Basically Reef Whirlpool was simply a bigger, denser cluster of Reefs than most of those stepchildren of Sol. Given time and additions enough, it might some day become the heart of a star.
Its angular momentum was enormous; some stronger force than gravity kept its parts from flying into space. The Reefs that composed it were older and . . . stranger than those outside. Pyropods in queerly mutated forms swarmed in and around it. Its central portions had never been visited by man, not even by the explorers of the Reefs.
It was a place of terror and legend. The life that it harbored had been a long time evolving.
Straight as an arrow the baby pyropod that once had belonged to Harry Hickson hurtled toward Reef Whirlpool—and behind it pursuing, barely able to keep its glowing blue-white trail in sight, followed Quarla Snow on her spaceling.
"I was afraid," she said soberly. "We passed a mating swarm of pyropods. Then ten thousand of them together, wheeling in space in a single body. If they had seen us and pursued we wouldn't have had a chance. But it was too late to worry about that . . . and I was even more afraid of Reef Whirlpool."
"The Starchild, girl!" cried General Wheeler. "Now!" His eyes were fixed angrily on the screen, where the Plan cruiser was coming closer and closer to the Sun, one great curved prominence seeming almost to lick up toward it like a reaching tongue of flame.
"We reached Reef Whirlpool," said the girl, "and there I lost Hickson's pyropod: But Bella—that's my spaceling—Bella seemed to know where he had gone. We went in."
From nearby in space, Reef Whirlpool looked like a tiny galaxy, its separate reeflets glowing each with its own hue, like bright, soft stars against the dark. The rim of the disk was dark—dead rocks and fragments. There, Quarla thought, were the nesting places of the pyropod swarms. She could feel the spaceling shudder, its limpid eyes wide and glazed with fear. But it went on.